Dorothy Parker's Still Got it

Dorothy Parker is best known for the work she did and the life she lived in the early 1920s. She was a pithy, fashionable young wit at the Algonquin Round Table who wrote caustic light verse and darkly funny short stories. Her later life was more complicated. Parker went through career highs and lows and always battled alcoholism. Marion Meade, Parker's biographer, has written a short book about Parker's final decades called The Last Days of Dorothy Parker. Much of the book focuses on Parker's contentious friendship with fellow writer Lillian Hellman. "Dottie" and "Lilly" were a "a perfectly matched pair, a kind of intellectual vaudeville team," Lilly's protégé said. In the below excerpt, Meade describes their relationship in the '40s and their feelings about feminism. –Jessica Grose

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"Constant use had not worn ragged the fabric of their friendship," Dottie wrote. She was referring, not to herself and Lilly, but to a pair of young women named Annabel and Midge who were "surely born to be comrades."

Stenographers in the same office, Annabel and Midge are best friends, whose desks sit companionably side by side. Boyfriends come and go, but the pair remain inseparable. On Saturday afternoons they stroll along Fifth Avenue playing their favorite game, doing what young women do when they have no money and nothing better to do: pretending somebody has died and left them each a million dollars to spend on themselves. Spying a double rope of pearls in a jewelry store window, presumably Tiffany's, they muster the courage to go inside, only to learn the price is a quarter-million dollars. Unlike Truman Capote's good-time girl who zips off to Tiffany's for breakfast, Dottie's heroines are working girls who have never visited the Stork Club or accepted money from men. They earn less than twenty dollars a week typing and taking dictation, and they live at home with their parents.

Midge and Annabel were comrades in "The Standard of Living," a story of Dottie's published by the New Yorker in 1941. By this time, she and Lilly had been comrades for seven years and, like the fictional secretaries, the fabric of their friendship remained unchanged; in fact, it was stronger than ever. What could be more natural than to dedicate her new volume of stories to Lilly, whom she held in high regard for both her political commitment and her talent as a playwright. (Here Lies, her seventh book, would be her last.) The following year, she composed an effusive foreword for a special edition of Lilly's play, Watch on the Rhine, to benefit the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee (a group later designated to be a Communist front by the House Un-American Activities Committee or HUAC).

Most of all, they had fun together. There was plenty of teasing and laughing at each other's jokes, no matter how lame. Their repartee amused not only each other but anybody within earshot. One time it was a ribald afternoon-long contest over which one had slept with the most awful men. Dottie proclaimed herself the winner; Lilly insisted she was bragging. Another time, after a party in honor of Helen Keller, which Dottie had declined to attend, Lilly came home disgusted by the pious chatter. What a waste of time, she complained. Without looking up from a book, Dottie said mildly, "It's your own fault, dear. Didn't I tell you she was a con woman and a dyke?" Peter Feibleman, the writer who was Lilly's protégé, called them "a perfectly matched pair, a kind of intellectual vaudeville team."

Notwithstanding their perfect match, the bond between them depended on censoring anything disagreeable. In contrast to Lilly's theatrical blowups with practically everybody she knew, she uncharacteristically muzzled herself around Dottie. Hurt feelings were not voiced, disappointments not confronted, and good manners unfailingly observed. Quenching anger and nursing grudges, they carefully avoided getting into fights. Lilly liked to insist that they never once exchanged "even a mild, unpleasant word," but it would turn out that she was quietly keeping score. When her father died, she made a list of those friends who had sent condolences. Dottie, she noted, did not.

It seemed clear to the playwright Ruth Goetz, a friend of both women, that Dottie admired Lilly, "but Lillian did not admire Dottie because she had no admiring mechanisms, and she wasn't generous about anything." Actually, there were few women in Lilly's life simply because she didn't like her own sex and saw no reason to be kind. She viewed women with suspicion, sometimes treating them savagely, or as the screenwriter Frances Goodrich put it bluntly, she could "get rough."

The she-Hammett much preferred to be one of the boys, as if association with the female sex might brand her second-class goods. Dottie, too, was famous for hanging out with the guys at the Round Table, and her oldest best friend was a man, the humorist Robert Benchley. Significantly, one of her chief literary subjects was the male sex, but her fascination with men was seeded with comic but ruthless digs, undergirded by exasperation, if not outright animosity. She is likely to have agreed with Rebecca West's quip that the opposite sex is primarily useful for lifting pianos. Despite half-joking remarks – "Dear God, please make me stop writing like a woman" – she certainly was not a woman-hater, as her verses and stories attest. For one thing, she wholeheartedly enjoyed the company of women and formed numerous affectionate relationships, sometimes with quite ferocious card-carrying feminists. Also, despite her love-hungry panic around men, she wore her beliefs like a badge and made a point of joking that she'd been an ardent feminist since buffalo roamed in Central Park. Lilly, scorning sisterhood as passé, equated it with those quaint suffragettes of her mother's generation, and when embraced by feminists in the 1970s, refused to acknowledge that the women's movement had any importance whatsoever.

Lilly was right: she and Dottie were an odd couple and should not have been compatible. But they were.

In 1944, when Dottie's work was collected into The Portable Dorothy Parker, she inscribed Lilly's copy with a syrupy love letter:

"For Miss Hellman – The most beautiful, the most rich, the most chic, the most dashing, the most mysterious, the most fragrant, the most nobly-born, the most elegant, the most cryptic, the most startling, the most glorious, the most lovely – in short, for Miss Hellman (from Miss Parker)." To be sure, it was hearts and flowers fluff but seemed appropriate nonetheless. By 1945, after fifteen years of economic depression and a brutal war, everybody was starved for a bit of giddiness.

From THE LAST DAYS OF DOROTHY PARKER by Marion Meade. Reprinted by arrangement with Penguin Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright (c) Marion Meade, 2014.

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